Saturday, 17 October 2015

Though I have wept and fasted, fasted and wept,I grow old I grow old, I will wear the bottom of my trousers rolled,and so on...

After 15 years and a completely life changing and very difficult year, it has become essential to definitively kill off Ergo Phizmiz, and begin my chequered career from scratch.Thankyou for joining me for the ride. And fret ye not, there are hundreds of hours of music online, and hundreds more still unreleased. At some point we'll empty out the vaults in a massive splat of audio and video.This blog will remain online as an archive.A re-baptism / un-baptism took place at the recent performances of "Billiards" with Mahogany Opera Group. I will be back in further incarnations. You just wait and see what happens next.Until then.....

Wednesday, 9 September 2015

Billiards

A collage operaProduced by Mahogany Opera Group in association with Sound and MusicAlone in his Manhattan research
laboratory, Raymond Scott, the father of electronic music, is developing
a machine to generate random musical patterns. When one of his devices
accidentally tears a hole in the universe, it begins a fantastical
space-music-history-sci-fi-gameshow encounter that brings him face to
face with classical composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Inspired by Mozart’s love of
billiards and Scott’s experiments in electronic sound, follow these
extraordinary characters as they debate random chance and creating
music, with some help from film-pioneer Georges Méliès, Lewis Carroll’s
logic games, and composers John Cage and JS Bach.

Ergo Phizmiz’s high-octane
opera-essay combines, video animation, puppetry, live singing, recorded
tracks and a remix of classical and electronic music to create an
exhilarating sensory event blurring the boundaries between opera and
performance art.

Billiards is a bizarre and feisty challenge to traditional preconceptions of opera.“For first you write a sentence,And then you chop it small;Then mix the bits and sort them outJust as they chance to fall:The order of the phrases makesNo difference at all.” - Lewis Carroll / Ergo Phizmiz BilliardsImages: Ergo Phizmiz, Impact

Saturday, 29 August 2015

Ergo Phizmiz presents the UK premiere of his experimental opera "Vogel Europa" at the Toi Toi Opera Club Night, London, October 28th 2015, presented by the Helios Collective.

"Vogel Europa" is an opera using song, found-sound, mixed
language, and rhythmic spoken word, taking cues from the intoned voice
operas of Robert Ashley and the simultaneous sound-poetry exhibits of
the Dadaists. The opera also makes direct reference to the work of
Polish writer Bruno Schulz, mixed with autobiographical references and
stories, fantasies, and multilingual bird-name directories from old
records. Finally, we will meet the last bird in the universe and
discover what his swansong is.

Tuesday, 14 July 2015

A new production of "Gala", Ergo Phizmiz's opera on the romance of Gala Dali and Jesus Christ Superstar, is presented in a new production, directed by the composer, at Arcola's Grimeborn 2015 Festival.

Jeff Fenholt is a twenty-one year old actor, playing the title role in Jesus Christ Superstar on Broadway. Gala Dali is the aging wife and muse of Salvador Dali. GALA is the story of their affair.This tragicomic chamber opera from 'renaissance man Ergo Phizmiz' (The Wire) plays at Grimeborn for one night only.A highly original voice in British music, Phizmiz has created award-winning radio pieces for the BBC, original albums and, most recently, a film score. This year he became the first composer-in-residence at the Hay Festival."One of the most inventive composers around ... a musical equivalent to Chris Morris" – BBC Radio 3

"The musical man-of-the-moment ..." – The Times

"Thanks for your beautiful, compelling, funny, crazy stuff. I listen to you while sitting at my drawing board. Keep up the fine work!" – Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons"I strongly advise you try and attend. For those of you unfamiliar with the work of Ergo, he is an exceptionally difficult fellow to describe, he has over the years produced a body of work that crosses over every kind of music and sound imaginable.” – Tom Ravenscroft, New Statesman "Not so much a one-man band as a one man movement" - The Wire Magazine"Always accessible yet always otherworldly….It’s at moments like this when the quixotic notion of Ergo Phizmiz breaking through seems more than merely a slightly unhinged dream" – BBC Music Review"Mad but mesmerising" – The Times"Ergo is a completely English original who I think we should cherish deeply” – Sound Projector Magazine"Eccentric, boundary testing, ridiculously different…In some ways you could say that Ergo Phizmiz is the complete artist…” – The Kaje"With so many claims to eccentricity in today’s pop-culture, it’s hard to differentiate talent from cliché but Phizmiz’s art places him as the real deal." – The Upcoming

Tuesday, 26 May 2015

Original instrumental music from the production for voice, puppetry and animation "A Fairy Tale of World War II", which premiered at Bridport Arts Centre, May 2015, supported by PRS For Music Foundation.